How to's of designing your own solar panel power plant

Okay, Here's some tips on setting up your own solar panel power supply for your house.
Take your last electric bill. It should show the monthly totals of kWatthours consumed. There are a few things to take note of when looking at these totals. Look for the months when the kwh(kiloWatthours) consumed was least, look for the months when the kwh was most and all all the months together to get a total of kwh consumed for the year. Each household will be different on these numbers based upon gas or electric heat, A/C or not, the quality of insulation used when your home was built. Your geographical location, is your house surrounded by large trees or out in the open? How much sunlight do you get during a summer day, during a winter day? Is your house located in a valley or canyon (or are you butted up against a hillside) such that you get shaded sunlight in the morning and afternoon rather than direct sunlight? What kind of appliances do you have? Do you have any unusual power loads in your home? Do you want to be able to keep power going when your utility power drops out and its night time? What is your typical could/storm activity over the course of a year? All these things and more effect your solar panel solution and the capacity needed.

Please refer to the tiny little table at the top of this article for the remainder of this discussion. Sorry it's so tiny, I couldn't determine how to insert a spreadsheet into this blog.

So, here in southwest Colorado where I live, actually, in the Arboles area, it has been referred to as the "banana belt". We indeed get our 300 out of 365 days of sunlight, so I will use that percentage 300 divided by 365 equals 82% sunlight in a given year.

So, there is a lot of information in that table. Let me explain. The first column is the total estimated direct sunlight at my location in total hours per day for a given month. The second column is total number of days for each month. The third column is the actual kiloWatthours used that I pulled from my electric bill. The 4th column is the number of potentially generatable kwh if you had 100% sunny days all year. The 5th column is derating the 100% sunny days with a more realistic 82% (300/365) sunny days. The 6th column is the number of kwh over or under produced for the given month. In this scenario the total produced kwh at 82% sunny days generates 1750 extra kwh at the end of the year. This will help accommodate for underproduction as a result of extra cloudy days when electric power generation is less than expected.

So, the first step is to produce a table for yourself like the one above and determine the quantity of power you will need to generate. Next, I'll post on how to calculate number of panels and how to determine the right sized inverter.
That's all I have for now.

Have a great day!
James